To approach being a practical energy source, the National Ignition Facility will need to increase its rate to perhaps hundreds of laser shots per second.At present they can achieve around 2 shots per day, with a laborious inspection process after each shot. Skipping the inspection step could cause one of the laser amplifiers to explode on the next shot - the energies involved are incredibly high.

This sounds like an important milestone in the search for practical exploitation of fusion - "proof in principle" is now established, and future progress towards harnessing similar reactions to those used by stars is possibly inevitable. It is unfortunate the the recent "Jade rabbit" rover on our moon has suffered a mishap - especially since the moon is a far richer (potentially) source of Tritium than Earth, useful in fusion reactors (from memory, Tritium is more efficient that fusing hydrogen)

As a practical source of power I have always considered ITER type fusion reactors a wild pipe dream what can we say about laser types they make ITER types mundane and practical in comparison !I remember well when the Sellafeild Plutonium plant was coaxed into producing 20GW we had he worlds first revolutionary nuclear power station.Laser fusion can only be a thinly disguised military project as for producing power its nonsense.

For the first time, the experiments have released more energy from the fuel than was put in by the X-rays – about 1.2 to 1.9 times more. Although this amounts to only 1% of the original laser energy, because most of that was absorbed by the hohlraum

Enough said? They would need to be able to ignite roughly 40-50% MORE fuel in ONE burst in order to produce more energy than was put in, as said in the OP. I still believe that magnetic fusion is A LOT more promising if they can create a self sustaining reaction, then over time it would produce more than it took to start the reaction, although then the problem is learning to stop the reaction quickly incase of emergency! THAT would be a big explosion!